Arrival in München

All three posts I have made on this blog has been made when I've been jetlagged and didn't know what else to do with myself (the rant about that random NYT article will, hopefully, not be repeated). It is currently midnight in Munich, although I feel like I'm essentially detached from normal temporal cycles altogether. I just slept for about four hours, so I'm partially awake now and have the delightful prospect of a sleepless night in which I'm too groggy to do anything actually productive. Hence this blog post, even though nothing remarkable has really happened. I've moved into my Wohnung, which is really nice and features a piano (isn't that the kind of thing you would expect would be in the ad? What if there were a harp, or a tuba?). I didn't want to sleep all afternoon, so I biked to the university library to attempt to register. This was a bad idea, as my German is atrocious even when I am alert. The whole adventure ended in confusion on both sides. I'm pretty sure that I did not successfully register and that a whole battery of official papers will be required before I can enter the hallowed halls of LMU-Bibliothek, which looks really nice on the outside but feels kind of like a public swimming pool inside (everything is linoleum and grimy, at least outside the reading rooms, and everyone has to use lockers). Nobody else who matters works on Friday, so I ate an enormous kebab and pretzel before taking the aforementioned nap.

I'm attempting to speak in Germany with my roommate, but his English is of course much better than my German; it remains to be seen whether he will be willing to keep up this charade. I have only uttered about 10 sentences to him, two of which contained howling errors. When he was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, I told him I wanted to go to the pharmacy to buy "Senf." This means "Mustard." What I was trying to say was "Shampoo". The way to say shampoo in German is "Shampoo". There was a complex set of mistakes in my head that led to this result, which I won't go into here. The end result is that I seemed like a maniac. The kicker is that he didn't ask me to explain; he just looked puzzled and said OK and left. Maybe I should just embrace it, and try to act like a person who after 20 hours of travel wants nothing more than a nice jar of mustard. I turned it all around when I got home by asking him for the password for "der Strom." Strom means "electricity" and in Germany, as elsewhere, electricity does not require a password. What I meant was internet. The correct way to say internet in German is "Internet."

Louvre

I can't let this article go without writing something about it. Everything about it makes me furious: the smug tone, the picture of tourists that we're supposed to judge, etc. Michael Kimmelman is one cultured mo-fo, and far be it from me to begrudge him that. Having degrees from both Yale and Harvard, including a PhD in art history, it is not surprising that he knows his art. He does not use this to question the position of art in society today: it functions as—in addition to opera—the most thoroughly classist medium I can think of. It's actually better than opera because if you are very rich you can buy some for yourself. Instead, he criticizes the rest of us for not being like him. I only spend so much time on this because his attitude is pretty typical among academics.

So to research this article MK went to the Louvre one day and he did not like what he saw. There were many people there who were less cultured than himself, and who perhaps had not even been to Ivy League schools. Instead of dawdling in front of pictures and admiring them for hours, as art historians do and as apparently was done in the 18th century, these barbarians walked through the museum quickly and even took pictures!

He begins by praising two women who happened to be browsing in this one particular room, before chastising those who either read the labels or breezed through the room without stopping. This could be read as evidence that they were on their way somewhere else, as the Louvre is very huge, and to spend the two hours per room that our sage recommends would take weeks. Instead, he reads it as evidence of our cultural crisis: after the collapse of our artistic canon, we no longer have any markers of value and just wander aimlessly (as though the persistence of the Louvre and the "scrum" around the Mona Lisa were not evidence that academic trends in art history have had precisely zero impact on the average tourist).

This is bad because, you see, in the 18th century, Europeans who went on the grand tour would study very hard, and learn French, and speak with philosophers when they arrived. So why, today, doesn't every tourist learn French and then book some meetings with a handful of French philosophers?

Kimmelman's answer: We live in a decadent society.

The real answer: The "grand tour" was taken by invariably high class people, who were freed from the need to labor so they could study French and art history all day to bolster their cultural capital. Even then they hardly took it seriously: read, for instance, "Portrait of a Lady." We now live in a different world: one in which you can't simply book an audience with a philosopher because you are high class. Instead, we live in a world where people have more disposable income than before and want to boost their cultural capital with a trip to the Louvre. These people work for a living, and have not been schooled by private tutors. Instead, they have gone to shitty public schools that do not offer art history, as mine did not. HOWEVER, because of people like Michael Kimmelmann, they believe that true culture requires a viewing of major art works. So they go and they aren't sure what to do when they are there, because it requires a lifetime of training to consume art the way MK wants us to, and so they go on tours or go right to the big stuff that MK-style experts have recommended they see.

Also: the very existence of museum culture is evidence of this mass-ification of aesthetic experience that Kimmelman turns his nose at. The great age of the museum is the 19th century, and the Louvre as we know it is a product of the French Revolution. The fabled Grand Tourists of the 18th century were not waiting in line at Met (opened 1872) or the National Gallery (1824): these institutions were provided in order to expose artworks to a broader audience who would not have had access before. They remain, however, frozen out culturally by articles like this even if their feet are allowed on the hallowed marble.

Finally, the sketching:

"Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds [unwashed Goths!] occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be."

First off, it seems to me pretty unlikely that sketching used to be normal. He provides no evidence, and it definitely is not obvious. It may have been normal for people like MK. But he completely ignores the fact that it is now NOT normal. It used to be normal to do all sorts of things: murder Catholics, take ten wives, wear a top hat, whatever. Just because something was normal once does not mean that it is normal and unremarkable forever. But let's grant that it was normal, at least for people like MK with the money and inclination to take ten-year old's to St. Peter's. This is not evidence of particular virtu, but rather of a very particular conjunction of economic and cultural capital that has had its heyday and the existence of which MK is perpetuating.

Insomnia

This blog was conceived in insomnia -- I was awake at 4 AM, for jetlag reasons, and couldn't go back to sleep. I was, however, not really awake; I was in that sort of in-between space that comes right before you see the beginning of the sunset. I was having lots of weird dreams about time-travel and jetlag. No matter how rationally I know the nature of the world temporal system, it still boggles the mind that one can, for instance, leave Japan at 3 PM on Wednesday and arrive in New York at 3 PM on Wednesday, as I did.

One of my dreams was about The Langoliers. For those of you who might not remember this book/TV movie: it's about an airplane that goes through a time warp. It doesn't go to a different time, exactly, but rather gets left behind in the stream of time. The cosmology of the Langoliers: time moves forward at a steady pace, and each moment leaves behind it a kind of shadow, that fades and is finally eaten by big brown time-monsters called Langoliers. In this temporal shadow world, matches don't burn, food doesn't taste like anything, etc. This reminded me of what insomnia feels like. It also kind of reminds me of the process of writing in general, or at least writing about your own life.

Other than this little story, I'm not sure why I started this, and far less sure that I'll keep it up. I do know that I tend to love it whenever my friends have blogs, whatever they might put there. So in the hopes that everyone loves procrastination and voyeurism as much as I do, I present my blog. RSS me.

[later update: I meant for the below to be its own post, but I accidentally added it to the former. For future historians, context clues date this at around 1 August. The post above was written before leaving for Israel and after coming back from Japan, dating it to around 28 July. I don't know why the datestamps have disappeared]

I'm currently experiencing insomnia again, which I thought merited an inaugural post. I'm staying at a woman's house in Jerusalem, which is exceedingly generous of her, as I don't even know her -- actually, we don't even know any of the same people, so it's highly mysterious how I ended up here and possibly a mistake. Anyway, the only downside to this house is the noise. I'm not talking about, you know, creaking doors. There is a dog who stays on a balcony right outside my window. This dog insists on disrupting my life every second that I am here. When I am not in bed, the dog is trying to bite me or my shoelaces. When I am in bed, the dog howls, all night long. This sets off a cacophony in the neighborhood, both of other dogs and of a bevy of do-gooders who think that by shouting continuously or slamming doors they will socially coerce the dog into silence. I possess a pair of those bright orange foam earplugs, which were not designed for noise such as this. I have been sent into depths of my soul that I did not know existed. I have very seriously considered murdering the dog, although I decided this would, actually, be pretty hard to do. So instead I lay in bed with my hands over my ears, praying for the merciful Langoliers to devour me.